The premise of the entire book is the author’s dive into the concept of a checklist and how they have dramatically improved the efficiency and reliability of professionals in the medical profession, the aeronautical industry, the architecture industry and even the venture capital industry.

So what is a checklist? It is the minimum set of critical steps for any task to be achieved.

Why are they useful? Because checklists protect against many kinds of dangers. For example:

1. “Faulty memory and distraction are a particular danger in what engineers call all-or-none processes – if you miss just one key thing, you might as well not have made the effort at all (whether it is buying ingredients for a cake or preparing an airplane for takeoff).”
2. “People can lull themselves into skipping steps even when they remember them. Especially in busy and stressed workplaces (such as hospitals). In complex processes, certain steps don’t always matter, may be it affects only 1 out of 50 times. But when it does, it can be catastrophic.”

One of my favorite passages in the book is as follows (it’s a longer excerpt than I would have liked, but all the parts were really important, so please read the whole passage to understand what’s going on):

Checklists remind us of the minimum necessary steps and make them explicit. They not only offer the possibility of verification but also instill a kind of discipline of higher performance. Which is precisely what happened with vital signs – thought it was not doctors who deserved the credit.

The routine recording of the four vital signs did not become the norm in Western hospitals until the 1960s, when nurses embraced the idea. They designed their patient charts and forms to include the signs, especially creating a checklist for themselves.

With all the things nurses had to do for their patients over the course of a day or night – dispense their medications, dress their wounds, troubleshoot problems – the “vitals chart” provided a way of ensuring that every six hours, or more often when nurses judged necessary, they didn’t forget to check their patient’s pulse, blood pressure, temperature and respiration and assess exactly how the patient was doing.

In most hospitals, nurses have since added a fifth vital sign: pain, as rated by patients on a scale of one to ten. And nurses have developed yet further such bedside innovations – for example, medication timing charts and brief written care plans for every patient. No one calls these checklists but, really, that’s what they are. They have been welcomed by nursing but haven’t quite carried over into doctoring.

Charts and checlists, that’s nursing stuff — boring stuff. They are nothing that we doctors, withour extra years of training and specialization, would ever need or use.

In 2001, though, a critical care specialist at Johns Hopkins Hospital named Peter Pronovost decided to give a doctor checklist a try. He didn’t attempt to make the checklist encompass everything ICU teams might need to do in a day. He designed it to tackle just one of their hundreds of potential tasks, the one that nearly killed Anthony DeFilippo: central line infections.

On a sheet of plain paper, he plotted out the steps to take in order to avoid infections when putting in a central line. Doctors are supposed to (1) wash their hands with soap, (2) clean the patient’s skin with chlorhexidine antiseptic, (3) put sterile drapes over the entire patient, (4) wear a mask, hat, sterile gown, and gloves, and (5) put a sterile dressing over the insertion site once the line is in. Check, check, check, check, check. These steps are no-brainers; they have been known and taught for years. So it seemed silly to make a checklist for something so obvious. Still, Pronovost asked the nurses in his ICU to observe the doctors for a month as they put lines into patients and record how often they carried out each step. In more than a third of patients, they skipped at least one.

The next month, he and his team persuaded the Johns Hopkins Hospital administration to authorize nurses to stop doctors if they saw them skipping a step on the checklist; nurses were also to ask the doctors each day whether any lines ought to be removed, so as not to leave them in longer than necessary. This was revolutionary. Nurses have always had their ways of nudging a doctor into doing the right thing, ranging from the gentle reminder (“Um, did you forget to put on your mask, doctor?”) to more forceful methods (I’ve had a nurse bodycheck me when she thought I hadn’t put enough drapes on a patient). But many nurses aren’t sure whether this is their place or whether a given measure is worth a confrontation. (Does it really matter whether a patient’s legs are draped for a line going into the chest?”) The new rule made it clear: if doctors didn’t follow every step, the nurses would have backup from the administration to intervene.

For a year afterward, Pronovost and his colleagues monitored what happened. The results were so dramatic that they weren’t sure whether to believe them: the ten-day line-infection rate went from 11 percent to zero. So they followed patients for fifteen more months. Only two line infections occurred during the entire period. They calculated that, in this one hospital, the checklist had prevented forty-three infections and eight deaths and saved two million dollars in costs.

If that, my friends, does not explain the power of a simple checklist, I don’t know what can.

And yet, despite these results, people were reluctant to adopt checklists. In fact, I know you are dismissing the idea right now. Try writing down 5 reasons why checklists are stupid and won’t work for you. Now write 5 reasons why it will work. Think over it. I bet most people find the 5 reasons against checklists, easier to write, but will be convinced about it after writing the 5 reasons for it.

Personally, I have been drilled into the idea of checklists thanks to the GTD Weekly Review. Since I use a checklist once a week, I started making checklists for the routine yet essential parts of my life, from organizing things around the house once a day to a preparation checklist for trekking.

I am trying to think of ways that checklists can apply to IT and software development. I guess we already have it in many ways – whether (1) in the form of Agile / Scrum / XP methodologies, or (2) in the form of code reviews (verification is outsourced to another human who has to run through the checklist manually), or (3) in the form of automated test suites (verification is automated).

But we seem to resist these checklists (as detailed in the book in other contexts including the venture capital industry), we think “Oh, I’m too professional for such a methodology” or “Pfft, it’s a waste of time, I just want to code.” I have been guilty of it many times as well.

And at the same time, I had not imagined that checklists can be used for ensuring communication to all the concerned parties.

Let me take an excerpt from Atul Gawande’s exploration of the architecture field in the book:

It is unnerving to think that we allow buildings this difficult to design and construct to go up in the midst of our major cities, with thousands of people inside and tens of thousands more living and working nearby. Doing so seems risky and unwise. But we allow it based on trust in the ability of experts to manage the complexities. They in turn know better than to rely on their individual abilities to get everything right. They trust instead in one set of checklists to make sure that simple steps are not missed or skipped and in another set to make sure that everyone talks through and resolves all the hard and unexpected problems.

“The biggest cause of serious error in this business is a failure of communication,” O’Sullivan told me.

In the Citicorp building, for example, the calculations behind the designs for stabilizing the building assumed the joints in those giant braces at the base of the building would be welded. Joint welding, however, is labor intensive and therefore expensive. Bethlehem Steel, who took the contract to erect the tower, proposed switching to bilted joints, which are not as strong. They calculated that the bolts would do the job. But, as a New Yorker story later uncovered, their calculations were somehow not reviewed with LeMessurier. That checkpoint was bypassed.

It is not certain that a review would have led him to recognize a problem at the time. But in 1978, a year after the building opened, LeMessurier, prompted by a question from a Princeton engineering student, discovered the change. And he found it had produced a fatal flaw: the building would not be able to withstand seventy-mile-an-hour winds – which, according to weather tables, would occur at least once every fifty-five years in New York City. In that circumstance, the joints would fail and the building would collapse, starting on the thirtieth floor. By now, the tower was fully occupied. LeMessurier broke the news to the owners and to city officials. And that summer, as Hurricane Ella made its way toward the city, an emergency crew worked at night under veil of secrecy to weld two-inch-thick steel plates around the two hundred critical bolts, and the building was secured. The Citicorp tower has stood solidly ever since.

The construction industry’s checklist process has clearly not been foolproof at catching problems. Nonetheless, its record of success has been astonishing. In the United States, we have nearly five million commercial buildings, almost one hundred million low-rise homes, and eight million or so high-rise residences. We add somewhere around seventy thousand new commercial buildings and one million new homes each year. But “building failure” – defined as partial or full collapse of a functioning structure – is exceedingly rare, especially for skyscrapers. According to a 2003 Ohio State University study, the United States experiences an average of just twenty serious “building failures” per year. That’s an annual avoidable failure rate of less than 0.00002 percent. And, as Joe Salvia explained to me, although buildings are now more complex and sophisticated than ever in history, with higher standards expected for everything from earthquake proofing to energy efficiency, they take a third less time to build than they did when he started his career.

The checklists work.

The lesson learned for me is that the book repeatedly showcases how simple checklists ensure that we get the basics right, which ultimately means we develop more trust in the ecosystem that things will happen (whether humans trust other humans more, or whether humans trust more in a system or process, or whether we trust ourselves more), and when that trust and stability is established, we go on to greater heights.

Let me give you an example to illustrate what I am thinking about – the trust factor also applies to any “productivity system” that you create for yourself, no matter how simplistic or naive. Until you develop trust in that system that it works and there are no major holes in the system, you will never trust the system enough to make it succeed, and ultimately you will sabotage yourself and your productivity system breaks down. This is one of the reasons why the Weekly Review is the secret sauce of the GTD methodology – if you review once a week, you can quickly build trust in your system that you are taking care of all that is important to you.

And, don’t forget that the Weekly Review is a checklist. And this is exactly why you probably need more checklists in your life.

So what are the checklists that you think you should have in your work life and personal life? I’m curious to hear, so looking forward to your comments.

P.S. I have taken the liberty of such long excerpts from the book in this blog post, because these two excerpts are from only the first 80 pages of the book, there are many more gems in the book (like the story of Hurricane Katrina and Walmart and the lesson of decentralizing decision making using checklists), if you’re interested, you should definitely go buy the book.

It is the same kind of problem being faced by, say StartupBuzz.org which, I am guessing, wants to be the Hacker News of India. There are indeed topics that apply only to startups in India, from “Startup Morning”, to India’s first in-taxi magazine. Such interesting events and ideas are worthy of discussion.

There is value in such a community, but again, how to build it? StartupDunia has already put its thoughts on the subject but the question still remains.

Here are some of my thoughts.

Does it require credibility?

• Hacker News has Paul Graham and YCombinator behind it.
• ProBlogger Forums have ProBlogger’s Darren Rowse behind it.
• And the most recent example of StackOverflow.com that has Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood behind it.

So the question is whether there each community should be backed by up by a credible person who has a reasonable authority on the subject?

Does it require an offline face-to-face presence?

• Would the Headstart Network have taken off without all the Startup Saturdays?
• Would the OCC mailing list have taken off without the Sunday meetups?
• Would chat.proto.in have taken off without the big showcase events that made proto.in famous?

(On the same note, I want to point out that there are other startup events that I’ve come across are not communities, they just happen to have good publicity. I just wanted to draw out that distinction.)

Would StartupBuzz.org have taken off it was started by the existing Headstart/OCC/proto.in communities instead of a standalone presence?

Does it require a news site?

• How did StartupDunia, Pluggd.in, Trak.in and others take off?
• Why does TechCrunch have 2 million readers?
• Why doesn’t, say, the Steve Pavlina Forums have the same kind of numbers?

Is building a readership/community easier for news sites?

Does it require a blog?

How did Lifehacker.com, Groklaw.net, and others take off?

Is community building intertwined with building a blog?

For example, consider SmashingMagazine and its related forums, ProBlogger and its forums, TechCrunch and its comments section, Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky are famous bloggers and so on.

Does it require specific social engineering?

I found the Joel Spolsky’s talk on StackOverflow very interesting from this perspective.

He talks about how they took into account that “Environment and UI influences behavior.”

He talked about the 9 things they used as core of the design of the site, and this specific design leads to the high return-rate on the community site. And I can attest to the fact that it does indeed work. It is a brilliant piece of social engineering. But then again, as he says, this particular model works only for professionals in such a field, and in this case, programmers.

Do watch the talk for more insights.

Are there some specific guidelines for it?

I am yet to read Yaro Starak’s “Membership Site Mastermind” or Chris Guillebeau’s “279 Days to Overnight Success” guides, but I see that they touch upon this topic in detail.

Maybe they’ve already solved this question?

Your Thoughts?

What are your thoughts? What do you think it takes to build a community?

• How did IndiaMike.com become so popular among travelers in India?
• How did BroadbandForum.in become so popular among internet users in India?
• How did PagalGuy.com get so many MBA students?

Is it sheer good content and number of years? Or being the first-to-market? Or is there more to it?

Only Capt. Gopinath (Independent) had arrived on time. Ananth Kumar (BJP) arrived a bit late but immediately greeted each and every individual in the hall and asked them to vote. When the organizers decided to go ahead even though there were only 2 candidates, Prof. Radhakrishna of JD(S) arrived. Krishna Byregowda (Congress) never turned up at all.

The session was mostly about questions asked by Mohandas Pai (Times of India) to the candidates and gave them roughly a minute each to answer.

Most of the questions were good and thankfully the answers were also forthcoming.

IMHO, Prof. Radhakrishna was rambling more than making sense. Since Krishna Byregowda didn’t show up, I don’t know much about him even though he has spoken well in interviews. Ananth Kumar and Capt. Gopinath were both impressive, made a lot of sense and had vision. It is going to be very tough to choose between these two candidates for me.

Plus points for Ananth Kumar include that he has been an MP four times, been the Civil Aviation Minister, etc. and he answered questions to the point. He indulged in rhetoric about why Congress has brought India down, and why things were great during Vajpayee’s tenure – ignoring these aspects, he seemed like a good candidate.

Plus points for Capt. Gopinath include that he has been an entrepreneur himself – Deccan Aviation made flying possible for the average person, he has been in the army and fought a war in Kashmir, and he voices Bangaloreans’ concerns well. He was vocal about the state of the Metro and questioned why trees in Lalbagh has to be cut down, and the whole crowd cheered for that statement.

Towards the end of the session, the audience also got turns to ask questions, but it turned out to be rhetorical provoking questions rather than questions with real value.

For more details about Bangalore candidates, read the full interviews at SmartVote.in. I’m sure there are more sites out there for the other constituencies in India.

I think there are two takeaways from the day for me.

First, vote for the candidate, not the party. If you think voting for an independent candidate is going to be a “waste” of your vote, think again. Is it better to have 500 excellent people in the Lok Sabha regardless of which party they belong to, or is it better to have 500 people, whose usefulness is doubtful, belonging to 2-3 big parties in the Lok Sabha?

There are good people stepping into politics trying to make a difference and we should encourage them. After all, we don’t jump into politics, let us support those who do. For example:

1. Rajeev Chandrasekhar, who was an engineer in the team that built the first-ever Intel CPU chip, founded BPL Mobile way back in 1994, CEO of Jupiter Capital VC company, and is now a Rajya Sabha MP (Website, Twitter)
2. Capt. Gopinath, as I already mentioned (Website, Twitter)
3. Mallika Sarabhai who is a noted Indian classical dancer, has a Ph.D and an MBA, and is now dipping into politics as well. Just listen to her, she makes so much common sense. (Website, Twitter)
4. Dr. Shashi Tharoor who has served as the Under-Secretary of the United Nations, is the author of 10 books, and won several journalism awards. (Website, Blog at HuffingtonPost, Twitter)
5. Meera Sanyal, chairperson and country executive of ABN Amro bank. (Website)

And so on.

These are well-qualified and well-off candidates who I believe are in a better position to serve the public. As Capt. Gopi insisted, he wants to do his own business as well as work in politics because unlike others, he does not want to make politics itself a business for him.

Second takeaway from the day was that the biggest problem is not the candidates or the system, it is the apathy and indifference of the voters. I’ve heard various statistics that less than one-third of the people in Bangalore actually go out and vote, which directly relates to why the politicians cater to those who actually do vote, then how can we complain that nothing is being done about the infrastructure?

If things continue as-is, our public life will go on deteriorating while we expect our private enterprises to continue prospering in spite of all the social problems.

As Deccan Herald put it:

You’ve got the dope,
you are the antidote;
Shut up and vote.

Please spend a few minutes off of IPL and think about why you are/are not voting, think about why people around you are/are not voting, and think about the candidate that you are voting for. See How to choose your Member of Parliament for guidelines.

If all this wasn’t food for thought, may be some cynicism (or astute observations, depending on your point of view) by The Comic Project is what you need:

Last but not the least, the election dates are listed on Wikipedia and you can follow the social media conversations at Blog Adda.

Update : Despite all the media attention and campaigning, 54% of Bengaluru did NOT vote. I am ashamed of Bengaluru at this moment.

I had grown up among engineers, and I could remember the engineers of the twenties very well indeed: their open, shining intellects, their free and gentle humor, their agility and breadth of thought, the ease with which they shifted from one engineering field to another, and, for that matter, from technology to social concerns and art. Then, too, they personified good manners and delicacy of taste; well-bred speech that flowed evenly and was free of uncultured words; one of them might play a musical instrument, another dabble in painting; and their faces always bore a spiritual imprint.

– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in his book “The Gulag Archipelago”

Though the Lok Sabha elections are just a month away, more than 50 per cent of voters in Bangalore still do not have Electoral Photo Identity Cards (EPIC).

Ramakrishna blamed lackadaisical attitude of citizens, especially software professionals, for low EPIC coverage. “People working in IT and BT firms show indifference towards EPIC. Even though our officials go to their doorstep on weekends, they do not respond. They say that EPIC is of no use of them,” he pointed out.

However, there has been a good response from those living in slums, the official added.

– Deccan Herald on March 20, 2009

The comprehensive reports are available in PDF format on a public website with even discussion forums (although the forums have poor participation).

• ABIDe Agenda
• Plan Bengaluru 2020
• Secure Bengaluru
• Govern Bengaluru
• Urban Poor
• Roads, Traffic Management and Transportation

Comments and suggestions should be sent to abide@abidebengaluru.in .

I’m surprised by the level of openness and invitation for public participation. I’ve heard that all these developments have started due to the initiative of Mr. Rajeev Chandrasekhar, a Rajya Sabha MP. If so, kudos to him!

On the other side, hopefully all those people who spend a significant time everyday cursing the infrastructure and traffic will spend a few minutes to review these reports and contribute suggestions and comments, to get rid of the very same problems.

And the process has already started. The government is launching Kendra Sarige AC buses today, which I think, is to influence people who can afford it to make using these buses more appealing than using their cars:

The Kendra Sarige is a bus service, also called the Hop on Hop off (HOHO) bus service, will run in the central business district only. The route covers the whole area from the Police Housing Corporation, Hosmat Hospital to Trinity Circle.

Almost 20 bus stops in the anti-clockwise manner and around 13 clockwise are planned. Nine air-conditioned Volvo buses will run clockwise and anti-clockwise in this circle itself. The longest trip on this route will take a maximum of 20 minutes.

There will be nine buses running every hour on the route. Bus frequency at the stops varies from three to seven minutes.

And another announcement is the “Big-10 buses” which connect 10 major roads in Bangalore to the outer ring roads, and these buses are going to be on trial for a week to see if it eases congestion.

To sum it up, they are making plans together with reputed citizens in the committee, actively asking for feedback from the public, they are conducting trials and making data-based decisions, and actively launching services. Isn’t this what we all want? If we can dismiss the cynics in us for five minutes, I think we can see all this as very positive steps.

Note on the Kendriya Sarige buses: To see the routes these buses will take, just visit the Bangalore Traffic Information System website.

Note on the Bangalore Traffic Information System / MapUnity : If you have some ideas on how IT / computers can really help traffic, then why you can send these ideas to the MapUnity folks who are doing a kick-ass job. And start/join a carpool while you’re at it – there are just 1676 carpoolers for an IT city of > 50 lakhs! That reminds me of the car vs. bus vs. bicycle photo…

Here’s a photo essay of the trip:

When we were reaching our camp area, the entrance itself was impressive, and I was excited by such clear blue water.

We had Breakfast and “kashaya.”

A short swimming session as an icebreaker, getting used to lifejacket and basic lessons for those who don’t know to swim.

We spent most of the afternoon learning how to paddle a coracle (a fibre one for safety). It was difficult at first but this quickly became my favorite.

Scrumptious lunch by Dharma.

Resting after all that exercise.

We went to another island to get a good view of the sunset.

Explored the island a bit. It felt like we were one of the first humans to trample on some of the grass there. There were no humans on any of these islands.

Driving away bisons, apparently.

Coracling back to the camp.

Campfire at night

Sleeping in dome tents on an island next to the water with a zillion stars in the sky.

On the Second Day, we learned how to paddle the Kayak and Raft.

The kayak is easy to get started with, but once a little wind blows, it throws you off completely. It takes a while to learn how to counter this.

The raft was fun too, especially to fall off into the water whenever you felt like it.

We trekked to the top of the hill and then back to Sagar to catch the bus back to Bangalore.

I had a lot of fun thanks to the gang of people I met there:

That’s Venkat, Arun, Vinayak, Mihir, Abhishek, and Saurabh (from left to right). And, of course, I’m the one clicking the photo.

Special appreciation for Sampath and the whole organization for organizing this as well as doing it for the right reasons:

We anticipate your continued active support and blessings to improve the activities further. Our aim is to expand the direct rural employment further and there by contributing to rural household economy. Our One more greatest achievement is that, we were able to convert small time timber smugglers in to force which is fighting against the tree cutters in the Sharavathi Backwaters by providing the alternate livelihood for them. We promise to work for the over all rural development and nature conservation. Also to serve the true nature lovers with renewed vigor.

To know when is the next activity weekend, join the sharavathy-valley-trekking list. Highly recommended.

Note: All the photos shown above are from:

• Me
• Vinayak Hegde
• Arun
• Abhishek Sahai

Here’s an excerpt:

Cultural legacies *matter*, and once we’ve seen the surprising effects of such things as power distance and numbers that can be said in a quarter as opposed to a third of a second, it’s hard not to wonder how many other cultural legacies have an impact on our twenty-first-century intellectual tasks. What redeemed the life of a rice farmer, however, was the nature of the work. It was a lot like the garment work done by the Jewish immigrants to New York. It was *meaningful*. First of all, there is a clear relationship in rice farming between effort and reward. The harder you work a rice field, the more it yields. Second, it’s complex work. The rice farmer isn’t simply planting in the spring and harvesting in the fall. He or she effectively runs a small business, juggling a family workforce, hedging uncertainty through seed selection, building and managing a sophisticated irrigation system, and coordinating the complicated process of harvesting the first crop while simultaneously preparing the second crop. And, most of all, it’s autonomous. The peasants of Europe worked essentially as low-paid slaves of an aristocratic landlord, with little control over their own destinies. But China and Japan never developed that kind of oppressive feudal system, because feudalism simply can’t work in a rice economy. Growing rice is too complicated and intricate for a system that requires farmers to be coerced and bullied into going out into the fields each morning. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, landlords in central and Southern China had an almost completely hands-off relationship with their tenants: they would collect a fixed rent and let farmers go about their business.

Here’s a second excerpt:

Every four years, an international group of educators administers a comprehensive mathematics and science test to elementary and junior high students around the world called TIMMS. The point is to compare the educational achievement of one country with another’s. When students sit down to take the TIMSS exam, they also have to fill out a questionnaire. It asks them all kinds of things, such as what their parents’ level of education is, and what their views about math are, and what their friendss are like. It’s not a trivial exercise. It’s about 120 questions long. In fact, it is so tedious and demanding that many students leave as many as ten or twenty questions blank. Now, here’s the interesting part. As it turns out, the average number of items answered on that questionnaire varies from country to country. It is possible, in fact, to rank all the participating countries according to how many items their students answer on the questionnaire. Now, what do you think happens if you compare the questionnaire rankings with the math rankings on the TIMSS? **They are exactly the same.** In other words, countries whose students are willing to concentrate and sit still long enough and focus on answering every question in an endless questionnaire are the same countries whose students do the best job of solving math problems. Think about this another way. Imagine that every year, there was a Math Olympics in some fabulous city in the world. And every country in the world sent its own team of one thousand eighth graders. Boe’s point is that we could predict precisely the order in which every country would finish in the Math Olympics *without asking a single math question*. All we would have to do is give them some task measuring how hard they are willing to work. In fact, we wouldn’t even have to give them a task. We should be able to predict which countries are best at math simply by looking at which national cultures place the highest emphasis on effort and hard work. So, which places are at the top of both lists? The answer shouldn’t surprise you: Singapore, South Korea, China (Taiwan), Hong Kong, and Japan. What those five have in common, of course, is that they are all cultures shaped by the tradition of wet-rice agriculture and meaningful work. They are the kinds of places where, for hundreds of years, penniless peasants, slaving away in the rice paddies three thousand hours a year, said things to one another like “No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.”

See how the two excerpts are related? This explains how your cultural legacies matter (and don’t worry, maths is not the criterion for success, this is just one example in the book). Another example is how cultural legacies are related to plane crashes of the respective national airlines.

There’s a lot more in the book like the Matthew Effect, the 10,000-Hour Rule, why “practical intelligence” matters, why “concerted cultivation” matters, about the KIPP schools, and so on.

The book is a must-read IMHO, just for the thought-provocativeness, even if not how to learn to be “successful.”

I’ve added a page on my wiki to list the type of common activities possible in India right from cycling to movie appreciation. Let me know if I can add more variety to the given mix of activities. I’m interested in figuring out what activities do people take up.

When there is a concept of retirement for many other careers like engineers, bankers, CEOs, etc. why shouldn’t the same apply for politicians?

If the reason for a retirement age in the private sectors is that the capacity to contribute becomes lesser, the same applies for politics. If the reason is that they should have a relaxed retirement life, the same applies for politics.

If the old people retire, it will give a chance for younger people with fresher perspectives to come in (with the hope that ‘remote control’ possibilities will be minimal), and at the same time the bureaucracy gets refreshed more often with lesser influence by the older people.

Of course, I know it’ll never happen, because the law would have to be passed by the very same people whose careers will be shortened.

Take the case of the Erdos number:

In order to be assigned an Erdos number, an author must co-write a mathematical paper with an author with a finite Erdos number. Paul Erdos is the one person having an Erdos number of zero. If the lowest Erdos number of a coauthor is k, then the author’s Erdos number is k + 1.

Erdos wrote around 1,500 mathematical articles in his lifetime, mostly co-written. He had 511 direct collaborators; these are the people with Erdos number 1. The people who have collaborated with them (but not with Erdos himself) have an Erdos number of 2 (8,162 people as of 2007), those who have collaborated with people who have an Erdos number of 2 (but not with Erdos or anyone with an Erdos number of 1) have an Erdos number of 3, and so forth. A person with no such coauthorship chain connecting to Erdos has no Erdos number (or an undefined one).

There is room for ambiguity over what constitutes a link between two authors; the Erdos Number Project website says “Our criterion for inclusion of an edge between vertices u and v is some research collaboration between them resulting in a published work. Any number of additional co-authors is permitted,” but they do not include non-research publications such as elementary textbooks, joint editorships, obituaries, and the like. The “Erdos number of the second kind” restricts assignment of Erdos numbers to papers with only two collaborators.

…

Erdos numbers have been a part of the folklore of mathematicians throughout the world for many years. Amongst all working mathematicians at the turn of the millennium who have a finite Erdos number, the numbers range up to 15, the median is 5, the average Erdos number is 4.65; and almost everyone with a finite Erdos number has a number less than 8.

So, Erdos numbers is essentially a social network that counts the degrees of separation.

Somewhat relatedly, there is also an interesting theory called Dunbar’s number:

Dunbar’s number is the supposed cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable social relationships: the kind of relationships that go with knowing who each person is and how each person relates socially to every other person.

Dunbar has argued that 150 would be the mean group size only for communities with a very high incentive to remain together. For a group of this size to remain cohesive, Dunbar speculated that as much as 42% of the group’s time would have to be devoted to social grooming.

I wonder what would be the Dunbar number of the social circles that I know of.